https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/has-age-digital-siege-begun-david-barrett/?tr... I won't claim to be any particularly adept student of modern history, but Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine seems to have triggered a digital counterattack without precedent. Not with the panoply of ridiculously-named (but truly terrifying) "cyberweapons" at each sides' disposal, but with a surprisingly mundane range of financial weapons (which should be named "finweaps" to add a testosterone-fueled edge). It makes me wonder if we're in for a new generation of "digital sieges" warfare, where there's no actual need to physically shut down an adversary's physical supply lines: you just take away their ability to pay. "De-SWIFTing" of Russian banks isn't a concept I'd ever really considered or heard discussed before a week ago, and now it seems like a dagger to the heart of the Russian economy. Russia has stockpiled one of the world's largest foreign currency reserves -- worth at least $600B -- which (to the degree I understand it) is intended to be used to preserve the value of the Russian Ruble, staving off a hyperinflation feedback loop that would have devastating effects domestically. But apparently the mechanism by which this strategy would be executed depends entirely on the SWIFT network of international wire transfers. Disable the ability of Russia to actually execute the purchases, and that $600B war-chest is effectively neutralized, locked within Russian vaults with no where to go. The idea of a banking protocol somehow bringing a superpower to its knees sounds far fetched, and surely wouldn't work by itself. But I wonder if it's just the first of many ways to "disconnect" Russia from the global economy? Some other options: * Identify every private jet currently in Russia, using the global transponder network. Blacklist those jets from landing at any "allied" airport, and if they do land anyway, just refuse to refuel them. We might render billions of dollars in oligarch aircraft hardware instantly useless. * Send an upgrade out to every iPhone and Android phone in the Russian empire, just turning it off until hostilities cease. An entire nation's ability to communicate internally grinds to a halt. * Identify every major internet peering relationship with Russia, and throttle its access to all allied services: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, all go offline. Bit by bit (literally, and figuratively) we might identify and disable every connection to the outside world, and turn it from a 1 to a 0. Can any nation truly survive digital isolation in today's competitive world? I wonder if it might be possible to lay siege to Russia entirely digitally, and win this war without firing a single shot -- without blockading a single harbor -- while establishing a sobering precedent for how to respond to "connected adversaries" in the future.